most "small" cars do pretty horribly on side collisions. The Cobalt and the Corolla are the only 2 cars that did "acceptable" with side airbags, and my car without 'em did "poor" as did 11 out of 13 small cars tested.

With the number of careless people, many of them driving larger vehicles, should a higher level of safety be a standard? It's kind of bad how you have to pay to upgrade safety features (curtain airbags, ABS, discs in the rear) so the base models are a lot more vunerable to severe injury in collision.

What do you guys think? The old-style Ram, Tacoma, and F150 were rated pretty horribly in safety. The old Tacomas I think had a problem with tipping. And the F150 was just completely demolished in a front-end collision.

With Chinese manufacterers coming into the market, they are absolutely terrible (apparently) in crash-test ratings. Like 0 out of 5 stars.

But the chance of a serious accident is minimal, although a leading killer of Americans. What do you guys think? Should government regulations impose mandatory safety standards on all new cars? Or should they be as unsafe as they want?

 

Safety standards get higher and higher every year. I bet those 'poor' results on those compact cars would have been 'good' results at the very least a decade ago. Not to say that's acceptable but it is somewhat understandable that as all cars are subject to the same standards when being rated, that a low cost, small/light weight car without nearly as many safety features is going to do worse in almost every category measurable except for things where being small and cheap become beneficial, like gas milage, and cost of ownership.

Also, FWIW, I've never heard of any serious issue with Tacomas rolling over - no more serious than any other small truck anyway. They did have a recall with the steering system for a select range of model years, a while back... that might have induced a manuever that caused the truck to roll... I dunno. Just my best guess as to where you might be remembering something like that from.

My Audi has some pretty great ratings -best in class in side impact and near best in class in all others... which seems strange for a car that seems relatively small, but then if you look to see how much it weighs for its size, you gotta figure they've got a lot of something somewhere making all that weight. Maybe it's safety bracing.

 

Yup, a car rated fair today probably would have been rated great in the 80's.

I will never buy another car without side air bags. My truck has them and after seeing the videos and reading about the ratings of how much side airbags help I think they should be standard in all cars. Or at least car makers should build more cars with them. I was searching cars for my GF and it is hard to find side air bags on low end models. Less than 50% have them

 

The current MotorTrend has a nice editorial on this topic. A lot of the crash tests produce inconsistent results and there was a website sited (see below) that produced a combined total of all tests with emphasis on the actual reported rates of each type of collision.

http://www.informedforlife.org/

 

I think they should level things out by removing safety equipment from 4,500lb+ vehicles. Get rid of that "im invincible" attitude.

 

i hate all this safety equipment stuff. it just weighs down the car, making it slower, less efficient, and, more on topic, a hazard to everyone else. then everyone else has to get something even more 'safe'. it's a viscious cycle that needs to be stopped.

you want safer streets? make people learn to drive and continue to prove they can drive. $20 every four years dosen't prove anything and neither does the initial test.

 

Well Jimbo, if you want to be safe, I guess you have to buy heavy. It doesn't make alot of sense that the same certification for a 2600lb corolla, certifies you for a 5000 lb SUV. but I guess alot of things don't make sense.
If we (I drive a Corolla) want to be safer we have to buy a more expensive, and heavier vehicle.

 

All I know is that I was hit at 45-55mph in my 95 Z28 Convertible when I was at a dead stop, and if it weren't for the doors being jammed shut, I would have opened the door and walked away. That to me is safe, and after that, I check the crash ratings for anything I buy pretty carefully.

 

No matter how much safety is legislated into cars people will always get hurt and die in car crashes. It is as inevitable as the sunrise. This is part of the reason the government is oversized. People refuse to accept reality, responsibility, and make decisions for themselves. They want their hand held through life.